“Yo, who's that guy everybody's lined up for?” asked this tall dude with Beats by Dre headphones, nodding at the swelling crowd around the Warp Records booth. I'd been at the Brooklyn Flea Record Fair for a couple hours and was a bit buzzed on Bitches Brew, but the question snapped me back to lucidity. “That's Flying Lotus, man!” I said. “He's signing his new LP Until the Quiet Comes.” I believe I dropped the adjective “dope” multiple times here.

As winds across the Williamsburg Waterfront concluded NYC's Indian summer, the arrival of Flying Lotus (né Steven Ellison) signaled the Cali producer's brief local residency, which includes a Terminal 5 show Sunday night and a Brainfeeder “takedown” on East Village Radio this afternoon. Basking in the man's broken-beat aura was a sublime bookend to an afternoon spent navigating the record fair's creamy nougat center withinSmorgasburg.

Moving away from NYC last year was rough, but rarely have I felt it so acutely as the walk on N 6th away from Bedford Ave, where the population of black-garbed Brooklyn girls — some in heels, more in skinny jeans, most sporting 12”-sized tote bags — increased tenfold. Couple that with Dogfish Head on tap at the barrel-bordered SmorgasBar, and I realized I'd landed in a specific sort of nirvana.

If I hadn't sent a Brooklyn Bangers weißwurst to my gullet like a scrumptious lead luftballon, I would've hit Yuji Ramen, where chef Haraguchi-san and crew concocted uni mazemen (sea urchin roe in dry-mixed ramen) assembly-line style. I'd pledged to remain sober for the first half of my record fair visit; besides, it's hard to juggle a notepad and a beer while digging through crates of LPs.

“You don't have any dubstep?” someone asked DUMBO-based techno titans Halcyon. I stifled an oath. The young woman next to me nabbed OutKast's Stankonia (LaFace) double-LP, and I stifled another oath.

I lingered at the Minimal Wave booth as founder/owner Veronica Vasicka updated me on Japanese pre-MIDI pioneer Sympathy Nervous. We recounted Modern Love's mind-altering sonic experience last night at Public Assembly, and I walked away with Sympathy Nervous' crystallinePlastic Love (Minimal Wave).

As the day progressed, rotating DJs segued from the Rolling Stones' “Get Off Of My Cloud” to Kraftwerk's “Boom Boom Tschak.” Clutching another cup of Bitches Brew, I mulled over the re-released Eraserhead Original Soundtrack (I.R.S.) at Sacred Bones and the rare stuff at Mondo Kim's: from Willie Hutch's Foxy Brown (Motown) to Squarepusher's caffeinated breakbeat Big Loada (Nothing/Warp). “Hey man, you see any dub?” one Kim's employee asked another, gesturing to a customer. “He's looking for dub.”

Now that's more like it, man. Flying Lotus would approve.

Images courtesy the author

I walked through the pouring rain to the opening night of Chris Ware's gallery exhibition. His latest book, Building Stories, just came out, and I wanted to see the artistic process behind my favorite book cover and, well,

I wanted to see who else was obsessed with this graphic-novel master.

There were a few people who, like me, were sipping white wine and looking at the panels for the sheer enjoyment of it all. I first learned about Chris Ware when I held Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth in my hands. Not knowing what to expect, I had flipped through the book and seen a wide array of ligne-claire faces (just like Hergé's Tintin series!) and carefully proportioned panels that were way more complicated than the Batman comics I'd read in grade school. And this Jimmy Corrigan wasn't a little kid, either. He was a middle-aged man and his entire life was depicted in hundreds of pages, some without any text at all (including some beautiful montages of the sun moving across landscapes), and some swallowed up by a single panel. I was hooked.

I read this book when I was seventeen, so I wasn't terribly surprised to see a few high-school students with backpacks peering at the art gallery's walls. They looked, snapped pictures, and then texted their friends.

The title of Chris Ware's Building Stories is a double entendre, of course: even as he details the lives of various inhabitants within a single apartment building, he lays bare the ways in which he constructed those stories. I love sketches and other evidence of the artistic process, and so I wasn't disappointed to see

gigantic pages that swirled with text and images laid out in all directions. Even in the most chaotic pages, Chris Ware so clearly anticipated the human eye's motions that I was able to piece together the stories he was telling. And it wasn't just the eye that he understood; as I read the stories of men and women, children and adults, I realized that he had found a way to encapsulate the difficulty and beauty of human life into squares and lines.

Near the end of one panel, a mother tells her grown daughter that she dreamed she had found a book filled with everything she'd done in her life: "The point is, I dreamed [it up]... I saw it — made it — with my own two eyes [...] I just never thought I had it in me, that's all, you know? *snf* ... I never thought I actually had it in me..." I'm pretty sure Chris Ware himself walked past me at that moment, or at least I hope he did. He reportedly struggled over the years of Building Stories's creation; he mentions the almost complete loss of his virility, and he's notoriously press-shy. This was the first time I had seen that particular strain of grief, recognition, and summation immortalized in art.

I repeatedly squeezed past a man who was holding a baby. Another type of person I hadn't expected to see at a gallery opening. Maybe these comics looked kid-friendly on the outside? Or they were just looking at the model house built by the artist? Ware's characters are so driven by feelings of longing, guilt, despair, surprise, and sexuality that I almost worry about minors looking at them.

But out of Ware's honesty great beauty arises: sequential art that can modulate the passage of time and memory, that can move us (in one of my favorite panels, linked above) from a drop of water falling to a woman checking the time and, in her mind, seeing daisies. I knew I had to buy the entire Building Stories and open the box with its fourteen different booklets and posters and newspapers inside. I kept looking at the panels along the wall. I forgot all the unexpected people around me and lost myself in Chris Ware's square panels, solid colors, and clear lines.

All images by Chris Ware. Sources: fastcocreate.com; thefashionchronicles.com; arquitectoserectos.tumblr.com; nycgraphicnovelists.com; sparehd.com. Click on the pictures for full-page layouts.

Everybody loves a good infographic. Need to summarize a complex set of statistics (like, say, alternate band names for Pussy Riot)? Try a pie chart. When scientists have trouble understanding data, they use 3-D imaging to map the invisible patterns of airplane turbulence or visualize how a woman’s hair might rumple if she uses X Brand of shampoo, as illustrated inDiscovery Magazine.

But how do you portray invisible occurrences that are not data-driven? What are my options if I want to visualize the emotional ups and downs of my new favorite song, or understand the subjective history of a public space? Can I get an infographic of some feelings over here?

Here are five artists who are making the invisible easier for us to see.

Music: Andrew Kuo

Andrew Kuo makes infographics based on unreliable information. His minimal, brightly colored graphs chart the unchartable, with a particular focus on music: he might rank the emotions of Kanye West’s “Robo Cop” in comparison to other "great" break-up songs, or plot his reaction to a new 9-minute Joanna Newsom single. If music really is just another kind of math, I want Kuo to be my trigonometry teacher. 

Motion: STREB
Choreographer Elizabeth Streb approaches dance like a scientific experiment. In performance and at her Williamsburg "lab," STREB dancers test the invisible laws of motion by throwing their bodies against them. Like, literally. Want to know what gravity looks like? Watch the dancers fly off scaffolding and land hard on their bellies, or balance impossibly on giant spinning hamster wheels. Seeking a spectacle that demonstrates the principle of inertia? Streb's got you covered: dancers run into walls at full speed, duet with lethal projectiles like steel beams, and generally stomp all over the limits of time, space, and muscle.

Cities: Rebecca Solnit
With 13 books under her belt, nonfiction writer Rebecca Solnit has made a career out of exposing subtle truths. (Full disclosure: I once worked for her.) Her 2010 book, Infinite City, visualizes the layered history of San Francisco through maps of seemingly unrelated sites: "Monarchs and Queens" overlays the natural history of the monarch butterfly with queer civil rights history. The result is an atlas of previously unseen connections, a shifting paper record of a living city. A New Orleans version, Unfathomable City, is due out in 2013.

Institutions: Anna Schuleit

There’s the invisible, and then there’s theinvisible — the people pushed beneath the narrative because, as Ralph Ellison’sInvisible Man put it, we refuse to see them. When the Massachusetts Mental Health Center closed in 2003 after 90 years of operation, artist Anna Schuleit was commissioned to create a work memorializing the building. Her stunning installation, BLOOM, filled the decommissioned mental institution with 28,000 living flowers paying tribute to the lives that passed through the space.

Media: Teju Cole’s Twitter feed
There’s invisible, there’s invisible, and then there’s dead. Novelist Teju Cole, author of Open City, tweets about the news — specifically, newspaper notices of death and crime from 1912 New York. He calls the project “Small Fates." Taken as a whole, Cole's timeline is a chorus of funny/sad ghosts. These are the long-forgotten voices of regular folk — criminals, victims, and reporters — a quotidian citizenry of the city, distilled into poetry.

Did I miss any? By all means list your favorite visible/invisible artworks in the comments. Granted, the question of whether what we see is truly "real" is always open to dorm-room-stoner interpretation. But I'm thinking that art has science beat on this one.
 

Images: BOMB Magazine, Andrew Kuo, Anna Schuleit